Wrong tone on school funding

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On one level, Labor's schools funding policy has much to recommend it. It belatedly tackles an inequitable and anomalous Federal Government funding formula. It tears away the charade that state schools are funded solely by the states and private schools by the Commonwealth. It seeks to quantify - $9000 a year for primary school students and $12,000 for those in secondary schools - the basic taxpayer funding entitlement of every child, whether publicly or privately educated. Characteristically, however, Labor went too far. For all the hysteria generated, its error is not that it has returned Australia to the divisive debate, settled more than 30 years ago, over whether tax dollars should be spent on private education. State subsidies are realities and will remain so. Labor's error was to couch a policy in rhetoric and specifics so as to inflate perceptions it was encouraging the politics of envy and denying help to Australians seeking to climb the highest rungs of Mark Latham's ladder of opportunity.

What is exciting the ire is Labor's plan to take from wealthy Peters to pay poorer Pauls. The 67 wealthiest private schools - those that charge annual tuition fees of more than $12,000 - would be stripped of excessive taxpayer subsidies and the $520 million five-year savings would be redistributed across the majority of non-government schools. In NSW 33 elite private schools would lose money, another 35 would stand still with only limited indexation, and 830 private schools would get more cash.

It is not that the wealthiest schools would be losing a long-enjoyed entitlement. The excesses result from the Government's Socio-Economic Status formula - the funding scheme introduced in 2001 with the irresponsible promise that no school would be worse off. Rather than maintain funding levels, however, payments to some wealthier schools have tripled in the past four years because the funding formula is clumsy and imprecise.

But there are equity issues with Labor's plan, too. The pool for private schools remains constant, albeit reconfigured. The "new" money - $1.9 billion over five years, and $850 million more than the Coalition's pledge - goes entirely to government schools. Some see this as discrimination against the less-expensive, smaller and popular end of the private school market. Unlike Labor's 2001 education package, however, this latest plan is built on equal benchmark funding for each student, seemingly enhancing fairness. The same cannot be said of exemptions for Jewish schools charging high fees, apparently aimed at Labor retaining a Melbourne seat with a large Jewish population.

Labor, it seems, unwisely expects the gratitude of parents whose children attend the 90 per cent of private schools that would get a funding boost. Many of these parents regard themselves as aspirational. Vicariously, they consider an assault on the wealthy as an attack on their own values. That's why Labor's education policy sales personnel should not so publicly, nor with such apparent glee, rub noses in the prospect of lost funding.

Guantanamo, Hicks and the rule of law

The federal Attorney-General, Philip Ruddock, has a habit of rejecting criticism with petulant denigration. He has done it again in responding to the report for the Law Council of Australia by Lex Lasry, QC, on last month's preliminary hearing of charges against David Hicks by an American military commission at Guantanamo Bay. Mr Lasry, an experienced and respected Melbourne criminal law barrister, was the only independent Australian legal observer at the hearing. His report deserved better than Mr Ruddock's dismissive suggestion that it was a predictable exercise in "chauvinism", and that it could have been written without going to Guantanamo Bay at all. The point is that Mr Lasry did go. It should be a matter of deep concern, not smugness, to the Government that what he saw at first hand confirmed the fears of many legal experts here and abroad that the military commission process is irretrievably flawed.

Mr Lasry concludes that a fair trial for Hicks under this process is "virtually impossible", and the Law Council says the same applies to the second Australian prisoner, Mamdouh Habib. Mr Lasry reports the normal rules of evidence are "all but absent", coerced confessions are admissible, there is no genuine appeals process, and the five presiding members of the military commission lack independence or impartiality (some served in Afghanistan and one admitted at the hearing that he had previously said all the Guantanamo inmates were terrorists). Only one member has legal qualifications, although all would decide issues of law as well as fact.

Hicks has already served more than two years of harsh, isolated incarceration and interrogation. He has been denied legal rights guaranteed to people accused of the most vicious crimes in Australia. Recently and belatedly, the Howard Government has asked the US authorities to consider apparently minor changes to the military commission's procedures. But it has singularly failed to show the readiness of say, the British Government, to defend the interests of its captive citizens.

The Ruddock defence of this victors' tribunal as necessary to protect security information seems a feeble rationalisation for agreeing to unacceptable compromises of the legal and democratic principles for which we said we were fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Law Council is right. Hicks and Habib should be brought before civilian US courts, or a properly constituted court martial-style tribunal, or be brought home.